by Dan Wells
“That's what this is like for me,” I said. “A new serial killer is like a new author, working on a new project, and he's right here in town under our noses and I'm trying to figure him out.” “You're crazy, man,” said Max. “You're really, head-on collision, insane-asylum crazy.” “My therapist actually thinks I'm doing pretty well,” I said. “So whatever,” said Max. “What's our big question?” “What is the killer doing that he doesn't have to do?” “How do we know what he has to do?” “All he technically has to do,” I said, “assuming a basic goal of killing people, is shoot them. That's the easiest way.” “But he's tearing them up,” said Max. “Then that's our first thing: he approaches them in person and attacks them hand-to-hand.” I pulled out a notebook and wrote it down. “That probably means that he wants to see his victims up close.” “Why?” “I don't know. What else?” “He attacks them at night, in the dark,” said Max. He was getting into it now. “And he grabs them when there's nobody else around.” “That probably falls into the category of something he has to do,” I said, “especially if he wants to attack them personally—he doesn't want anybody else to see him.” “Doesn't that count for our list?” “I guess, but nobody who kills really wants to be seen, so it's not a very unique trait.” “Just put it on the list,” said Max, “it doesn't always have to be just your ideas on the list.” “Okay,” I said, writing it down, “it's on the list: he doesn't want to be seen; he doesn't want anyone to know who he is.” “Or what he is.” “Or what he is,” I said, “whatever. Now let's move on.” “He pulls out his victim's guts,” said Max, “and he stacks them in a pile. That's pretty cool. We could call him the Gut Stacker.” “Why would he stack their guts in a pile?” I asked. A girl walked by our table and gave us a weird look, so I lowered my voice. “Maybe he wants to take time with his victims, and enjoy the kill.” “You think he takes out their guts while they're still alive?” asked Max. “I don't think that's possible,” I said. “What I mean is, maybe he wants to enjoy the kill after the fact. There's a famous Ted Bundy quote—” “Who?” “Ted Bundy,” I said. “He killed thirty or so people around the country in the seventies—he's the one they invented the term 'serial killer' for.” “You know some weird crap, John.”
“Anyway,” I said, “in an interview before he was executed he said that after you killed someone, if you had enough time, they could be whoever you wanted them to be.” Max was silent for a moment. “I don't know if I like talking about this anymore,” he said. “What do you mean? It didn't bother you a minute ago.” “A minute ago we were talking about guts falling out,” said Max, “and that's just gross, not scary. This stuff is kind of messed up, though.” “But we just started,” I said. “We're just getting into it. It's, a serial-killer profile, of course it's going to be messed up.” 1“: ”It's just kind of freaking me out, okay?“ said Max. ”I don't know. I gotta go to the bathroom." He got up and left, but left his food behind. At least he wasn't leaving for good. Not that I cared if he did. Why couldn't I just have a normal conversation with someone? About something I wanted to talk about? Was I really that screwed up? Yeah, I was. 5 There is a lake outside of town, just a few miles past our house. Its real name is Clayton Lake, predictably, since everything in the whole county is named Clayton, but I liked to call it Freak Lake. It was about a mile or so across, and a few miles long, but there wasn't a marina or anything; the beaches .were marshy and full of reeds, and the water filled up with algae every summer, so nobody really went swimming there, either. In another month or two, it would freeze over, and people would go skating and ice fishing, but that was pretty much it—every other season of the year, there was no reason to go there at all, and nobody ever used it for anything. At least that's what I thought before I found the freaks. I honestly don't know if they're freaks or not, but I have to assume there's something wrong with them. I found them the year before, when I couldn't stand being home alone with Mom for another minute, and I hopped on my bike and pedaled down the road to nowhere. I wasn't going to the lake, I was just going, and the lake happened to be in the same direction. I passed a car with a guy in it, just sitting
there, parked on the side of the road, watching the lake. Then I passed another. A half mile later I passed an empty truck—I don't know where the driver was. A hundred yards down there was a woman outside of her car leaning on the hood—not looking at anything, not talking to anyone, just leaning there. Why were they all here? The lake wasn't much to look at. There wasn't anything to do. My thoughts turned immediately to illicit activities—drug handoffs, secret love affairs, people dumping bodies—but I don't think that was it. I think they were out there for,the same reason I was out there: they needed to get away from everything else. They were freaks. After that I went to Freak Lake whenever I wanted to be alone, which was more and more often. The freaks were there, sometimes different ones, sometimes the same, arrayed along the lakeside road like a string of rejected pearls. We never talked—we didn't fit anywhere else, so it was foolish to assume that we'd fit any better with each other. We just came, and stayed, and thought, and left. After Max's outburst at lunchtime, he steered clear of me the rest of the day, and after school, I rode out to Freak Lake to think. The leaves had long passed the bright orange phase and faded into brown, and the grass on the side of the road was stiff arid dead. “What did the killer do that he didn't have to do?” I said out loud, dropping my bike in the dirt and standing in a warm patch of sun. I could see cars, but none were near enough for people in them to hear me. Freaks respected each other's privacy. “He stole a kidney from the first one, but what did he take from the second?” The police weren't talking, but we'd get the body at the mortuary soon. I picked up a rock and threw it In the lake. I looked down the road a few hundred yards to the nearest car; it was white and old, and the driver was staring out at the water. “Are you the killer?” I asked softly. There were five or six people here today, at various points on the road. How long before Mom's prediction came true, and people in town started blaming each other? People feared what was different, and whoever was the most different would win the witch-hunt lottery. Would it be one of the freaks who escaped to the lake? What would they do to him? Everyone knew I was a freak. Would they blame me? The second body arrived at the mortuary eight days later. Mom and I had spoken little about my sociopathy, but I'd made sure to try harder in school as a way of throwing her off the scent—making, her think about my good traits instead of my disturbing ones. Apparently it worked, because when I came home to the mortuary after school and found them working on the second victim's body, Mom didn't stop me from
pulling on an apron and mask and starting to help. “What's missing?” I asked, holding bottles for Mom as she poured formaldehyde into the pump. Margaret had only a few organs on the side counter, and she was busily sticking them with the trocar and vacuuming them clean. I assumed the rest of the organs were already inside. Mom had covered the body with a sheet, and I didn't want to risk looking under it while she was standing right there. .ij, “What?” asked Mom, watching the marks on the side of the pump tank as she poured. “Last time there was a kidney missing,” I said. “Which organ is it this time?” “The organs are all there,” she said, laughing. “Give Ron a break—he's not going to lose something every time. I talked to your sister about the paperwork, though, and how she needs to read it a little more closely and tell me about any abnormalities she finds. Sometimes I don't know what to do with that girl.” “But... are you sure?” I asked. The killer had to take something. “Maybe it was the gall bladder, and Ron just thought this guy'd had it removed already, so he didn't notice.” “John, Ron and the police—and the FBI, I should point out—have had this body for more than a week. Forensic experts have gone over it with a fine-toothed comb looking for everything they can find that will let them catch this sicko. If there was an organ missing, they would have noticed.” “He's leaking,” I said, pointing at the body's left shoulder. A bright blue chemical was oozing out from under the sheet,
mixed with swirls of clotted blood. “I thought I patched it better than that,” Mom said, capping the formaldehyde and handing it to me. She pulled back the sheet to reveal the shoulder stump, tightly bandaged, the bottom half soaked through with blue-and-purple slime. The arm was gone. “Bother,” she said, and started hunting for some more bandages. “His arm is gone?” I looked up at my Mom. “I asked what was missing, and you didn't think to mention his arm?” “What?” asked Margaret. “The killer took the arm,” I said, stepping up to the corpse and pulling back the sheet. The abdomen was torn open, like before, but not nearly so grotesquely; the gashes were smaller, and there were fewer of them. The dead farmer—Dave Bird, according to his tag—hadn't been gutted. “The eviscerating and the piling up the organs—he didn't do that this time.” “What are you doing?” said Mom harshly, snatching the sheet from my hand and covering the body back up. “Show some respect!” I was talking too much, and I knew I was talking too much, but I couldn't stop. It was like my brain had been cut open, and every thought inside was spilling out on the floor. “I thought he was doing something with the organs,” I said, "but he was just sifting through them to find what he wanted.
He wasn't organizing them or playing with them or—“ ”John Wayne Cleaver!“ Mom said harshly. ”What on Earth are you raving about?“ ”This changes the whole profile,“ I said, willing myself to shut up, but my mouth just kept going. My new discovery was too exciting. ”It's not what he's doing to the bodies, it's what he's taking from them. Pulling all the guts out was just an easy way to find a kidney, not a death ritual—“ ”A death ritual?“ asked Mom. Margaret put down the trocar and looked at me; I could feel their eyes boring into me, and I knew I was in trouble. I'd said far too much. ”Would you like to explain yourself?“ asked Mom. I needed to play this off somehow, but I was too deep into it. ”I was just saying that the killer wasn't playing with the bodies,“ I said. ”That's good, right?“ ”You were excited,“ Mom accused. ”You were tickled pink about this man's dead body and the way it was torn open.“ ”But—“ ”I saw joy in your face, John, and I don't think I've' ever seen it before, and it was because of a dead body—a real person, with a real family and a real life, and you can't get enough of it.“ ”No, that's not—“ , ”Out,“ Mom said, her voice thick with finality. ”What?“ ”Out,“ she said. ”You're not allowed in here anymore.“ ”You can't do that!“ I shouted. ”I'm the owner and your mother,“ she said, ”and you're getting far too worked up about this, and I don't like the way you're acting or the things you're talking about.“ ”But—“ ”I should have done this a long time ago,“ she said, putting a hand on her hip. ”You're restricted from the back room— Margaret won't let you in either, and I'll let Lauren know, too. It's time for you to get some normal hobbies and some real ' ' friends, and I don't want to hear any back talk about it.“ ”Mom!“ ”Not any,“ she said. ”Go.“ I wanted to hit her. I wanted to hit the walls and the counters and the dead farmer on the table and pick up the trocar and jam it into Mom's stupid face and suck her brain right out— No. Calm down. I closed my eyes. I was breaking too many rules. I couldn't think like that; I couldn't let that rage take over. I kept my eyes closed and slowly peeled off my gloves and mask. ”I'm sorry,“ I said. ”I—“ I couldn't just walk out of here and never come back, I had to fight, and . . . No. Calm down. ”I'm sorry," I said again. I took off my apron and walked
out the back door. I could deal with this later. Right now my rules were more important. I had to keep that monster behind its wall. I hated Halloween. It was all so dumb—no one was really scared, and everyone walked around covered with fake blood or rubber knives or, worst of all, costumes that weren't even scary. Halloween was supposed to be the night when evil spirits walked the Earth—the night when druids burned children in wicker cages. What did that have to do with dressing up like Spider-Man? I stopped caring about Halloween when I was eight, about the same time I started learning about serial killers. That doesn't mean I stopped dressing up, just that I stopped picking my own costumes—each year my mom would choose something, and I'd wear it and ignore it and then forget about it until the next year. Someday I'd have to tell her about Ed Gein, whose mother dressed him as a girl for most of his childhood. He spent most of his adulthood killing women and making clothes out of their skin This year, you'd have thought that Halloween would be pretty cool—after all, we had a real demon in town, with fangs and claws and everything. That ought to count for something. But none of us knew about it yet, and it had only killed two people so far, so instead of cowering in our basements praying for salvation, we ended up in the high school gym pretending to enjoy a Halloween dance. I'm actually not sure which is worse. School dances in junior high had been pretty terrible, and Mom made me go to all of them. Since she had no intention of changing that policy when I got to high school, I hoped that at least the dances would get better. They didn't. The Halloween dance turned out to be especially stupid—a time for all the awkward, ungainly, half-developed mutants in high school to get together, in costume, and stand by the walls of the gym while colored lights flashed anemically and the vice-principal played year-old songs over the school PA. As part of Mom's “make some real friends” initiative she was, as always, forcing me to go, though in a gesture of goodwill she allowed me to pick my own costume. Because I knew it would piss her off, I went as a clown. Max was an army commando of some kind, wearing his dad's camouflage jacket and some blobby brown makeup on his face. He'd also brought a plastic gun, despite the school's repeated warning not to bring weapons, so of course the principal had taken it at the door. “This sucks,” said Max, punching his fist and glaring across the gym at the principal. “I'm going to go steal it back, dog, I really am. You think he's going to give it back?” “Did you just call me 'dog'?” I asked.
“Dude, I swear I'm going to get my gun back, and he won't even know it. My dad showed me some sweet moves—he'll never know I was even there.” “You're wearing the wrong camouflage,” I said. We were in our regular position, lurking in the corner, and I was watching the flow of people to and from the refreshments and the walls. “My dad got this jacket in Iraq,” said Max, “it's as real as it gets.” “Then it'll be awesome when Mr. Layton hides your gun in Iraq,” I said, “but we're at a school dance in midwestern America. If you don't want him to see you, you need to dress up as a car-crash victim. There's a lot of those tonight. Or you need a fake bullet hole in your forehead.” Cheap prosthetic gore was the order of the day for at least half of the guys at the dance. You'd think that two gruesome murders in the community would make people a little more sensitive about that, but there you go. At least no one dressed up as an eviscerated auto mechanic. “That would have been sweet,” said Max, looking at a passing plastic bullet hole. “That's what I'm going to do tomorrow night for trick-or-treating—it'll scare the crap out of 'em.” “You're going trick-or-treating?” laughed a voice. It was Rob Anders, walking past with a couple of his friends. They'd all hated me since third grade. “Couple of little babies going trick-or-treating—that's for kids!” They walked past laughing. “I'm only going because of my little sister,” Max grumbled, glaring at their backs. “I'm going to get my gun; this costume looks way cooler with a gun.” He stalked off toward the far door, leaving me alone in the dark. I decided to get a drink. The refreshment table was pretty sparse—a tray of limp vegetables, a couple of half-donuts, and a bowl full of apple juice and Sprite. I poured myself a glass and immediately dropped it when somebody bumped me from behind. The juice fell back into the bowl, along with my cup, splashing up and soaking my wrist and arm. Rob Anders and his buddies snickered as they walked away. I used to have a list of people I was going to kill one day. It was against my rules now, but sometimes I really missed that list. “Are you it?” asked a girl's voice. I turned and saw Brooke Watson, a girl from my street. She was dressed a little like my sister had been the other night, in clothes from the eighties, y “Am I what?” I asked, fishing my cup out of the bowl. The c
lown from It, that Stephen King book,“ said Brooke. ”Nope,“ I said, wringing out my sleeve into the salvaged cup and sopping it with napkins. ”And I think that clown was named Pennywise.“ ”I don't know, I've never read it,“ she said, looking down. ”It's on my parents' bookshelf, though, and I've seen the cover, so I thought that was maybe what you were dressed up as—I don't know." She was acting funny, like she was . . . I couldn't tell. I had
trained myself to read visual cues from people I knew well, so that I could tell what they were feeling, but someone like Brooke was illegible to me. I said the only thing I could think of. “You're a punk?” “What?” “What do they call people from the eighties?” I asked. “Oh,” she laughed. It was a beautiful laugh. “I'm my mother, actually—I mean, these are her clothes from high school. I guess I should tell people I'm Cyndi Lauper, though, or something, because dressing up as your mother is pretty lame.” “I almost dressed up as my mother,” I said, “but I was worried about what my therapist would say.” She laughed again, and I realized that she thought I was joking. It was probably for the best, since telling her the second half of my Mom costume — a giant fake butcher knife through the head — would probably freak her out. She was really quite pretty — long blond hair, bright eyes, and a wide, dimpled smile. I smiled back. “Hey Brooke,” said Rob Anders, walking up with a malicious grin. “Why are you talking to that little kid? He still goes trick-or-treating.” “Really?” asked Brooke, looking at me. “I was gonna go, too, but I wasn't sure— it still sounds fun, even if we are in high school now.” I may not understand whatever emotion Brooke was broadcasting, but embarrassment was one I was all too familiar with, and Rob Anders was shedding it now in waves. “I . . . yeah,” said Rob. “I think it does sound kind of fun. Maybe I'll see you out there.” I felt a sudden urge to stab him. “But what about this clown getup, John?” he said, turning his attention to me. “You gonna juggle for us, or cram a whole bunch of yourself into a car?” He laughed, and glanced behind him to see if his friends were laughing as well, but they'd wandered off to talk to Marci Jensen — she was dressed as a kitty, in a costume that made it very obvious why Max was obsessed with her bra. Rob stared for a moment, then turned back quickly. “So what's it gonna be, clown? Why ya smiling so big?” “You're a great guy, Rob,” I said. He looked at me oddly. “What?” he asked. “You're a great guy,” I said. “That's a very good costume, and I especially like the bullet hole in the forehead.” I hoped he would leave now. Saying nice things about people I got really mad at was one of my rules, to help keep things from ' escalating, but I didn't know how long I could keep it up. “Are you making fun of me?” he asked, glaring. I didn't have a rule for what happened if the person I complimented didn't leave. “No,” I said. I tried to improvise, but I was already off balance. I didn't know what to say. “I think you're smiling because you're such a retard,” he
